After the last couple of night's difficulties with the Dashboard website, I thought that I ought to get my routes all 'Available Offline' on the Karoo itself. I wondered how well this might go - I have read so many reports of hung transfers and things stuck queued up for ever.

I have a list of 46 routes, and I had about 6 of them available offline on the Karoo to begin with. I then set about changing the slider on each route. I did this one at a time, not wanting to over-stress things. The route status went to Waiting, to Queued and then to Downloading with just a couple of seconds between each status change. The downloads took from a minute to a few minutes, depending on the length of the route and whether I had routes in that area already on the device. I am surmising that in addition to the route path, the Karoo has to download the necessary map tiles for that route. Each download completed without a hitch, using my home wifi which maxes out at about 3 Mbps.

And now I have all the routes downloaded to the Karoo I feel a little more secure; I have also downloaded the GPX files to my PC too - just in case ...

All went just as it should have done. The routes are mostly for a French cycling tour back from Agen in France to the UK, about 900 kms in total. Interestingly the used storage went from 150 MB used to 400 MB, leaving over 9 GB free. I don't foresee storage space pressure for a while.

I have resisted downloading any extra offline map areas, since many people appear to have difficulties downloading them. Since I am on a planned trip with my routes mostly decided, I can't see the need for any other downloads. Looking at the map on the Karoo now I can see I have sufficient detail - all the roads and names all around the route. I guess I could have a problem if I need to do a big detour for some reason (French roadworks!), but in that case I would either use a mobile hotspot on my phone to connect the Karoo to the internet, or I will use Google Maps on the phone. I have found I get a mobile signal in most places on the road where I go. If I need to do re-planning in general I would use the mobile hotspot - roaming in Europe is such good value now.

So, I am prepared, and again pleased that the Karoo is treating me kindly.

*Breaking news*

It looks as though the Dashboard is down again (Saturday evening in UK, Saturday pm in North America). I wonder if it is getting overloaded with all the new Karoo deliveries?